CMOS, CCD and other image acquisition technologies are traditionally manufactured based upon 2D, industrial and/or other traditionally (potentially) mass-produced consumer requirements. This results in the need for custom silicon, sensors, electronics, and the like for niche markets, including light-field and ultra-high-resolution image acquisition.
The digital imaging industry continues to push the boundaries of bleeding edge acquisition technologies, with particular focus on higher resolutions, higher dynamic range, and a wider gamut of still and video capture formats. Accordingly, it is becoming increasingly challenging to achieve the imaging requirements for sensor pixel density, sensitivity, pixel counts, electronics, pixel pitch, data throughput, bandwidth, and the like. Some of these requirements, when used with traditional optical pathways, would require extremely complex custom silicon advances and other electronic developments that are typically beyond the current capabilities of manufacturing. Such solutions, when they are attainable with current technology, are typically expensive and time-consuming to implement.
The limitation to sensor array density involves the package and electronics size of each imaging/sensor device. Generally, these packages represent more than half of the size of the active imaging area of the individual sensor. Thus, these sensors cannot be arrayed without causing large gaps between images produced by the sensors, or overly complex and problematic optical systems to compensate for the presence of these gaps. Further, this problem is exacerbated by the electronics requirements for the interface and processing boards required to capture or transmit the data to a storage device. These gaps present a challenge that has not been successfully addressed by prior art attempts to provide higher-resolution digital image capture.